Google, Zen Master of the Market — Bill Gates, who walked away from full-time work at Microsoft last month, was perhaps the foremost applied economist of the second half of the 20th century. — Mr. Gates and Microsoft fundamentally shaped how people think about the behavior of modern markets …

The Facebooker Who Friended Obama — Last November, Mark Penn, then the chief strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton, derisively said Barack Obama's supporters “look like Facebook.” — Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment. — Mr. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook.

Apple MacBook: Change is in the Air — The Apple MacBook Air has been a ground-breaking, first-generation product. So, what will Apple do to top it when an update comes later this year? There are some telling indicators already. This is what I expect—and hope for—as a user. — First, a disclaimer.

Service and the Fifty Percent Rule — Next time you go into an Apple store, notice that 50% of the space is for retail sales and 50% for service and support. I overheard this weekend that it is the most profitable arrangement in the history of retail. — True or not, it is curiously obvious …

LG Chocolate 3 to be released July 14th — Beginning on July 14th, Verizon will introduce its new music-centric device, the Chocolate 3. Unlike the first two LG Chocolate phones that were sliders (VX8500, VX8550), the new VX8560 model will be a clamshell avaliable initially in Black and Light Blue.

Still more reasons to avoid Internet Explorer — A few recent stories highlighted a bedrock of Defensive Computing - if you surf the web on a Windows computer, you are safer using Firefox as opposed to Internet Explorer. — On June 26th at ZDNet Ryan Naraine wrote about a new bug in Internet Explorer …

Segway CTO Leaves for Apple as Product Design VP — Phil Torrone noticed today on the Segway Chat forums that “Doug Field, the chief technology officer at Segway who heads their entire engineering team (and has since Day 1), is leaving Segway to become a VP of product design at Apple.”

The disruptive potential of GPS on the iPhone 3G — A recent survey showed nearly half of respondents rated GPS as a deciding factor in favoring an iPhone 3G, which should be good news for makers of GPS software and services. Or not. Forbes has an interesting article that suggests …

DRILLING DOWN; Phones' Texting Feature Often Unused — In a recent survey of people from 11 countries, South Koreans were the second most likely to own cellphones with e-mail capabilities. Sixty-nine percent of the South Korean respondents had such phones, compared with 89 percent of Japanese respondents, who came in first.

NBC UNIVERSAL, BAIN CAPITAL AND THE BLACKSTONE GROUP SIGN AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE THE WEATHER CHANNEL PROPERTIES FROM LANDMARK COMMUNICATIONS — NBC Universal, Bain Capital and The Blackstone Group today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire The Weather Channel properties from Landmark Communications.